Remembering the "Forgotten War": America Historiography on World War I

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World War I has occupied an uneasy place in the American public and political consciousness. In the 1920s and 1930s, controversies over the war permeated the nation's cultural and political life, influencing memorial culture and governmental policy. Interest in the war, however, waned considerably after World War II, a much larger and longer war for the United States. Despite a plethora of scholarly works examining nearly every aspect of the war, interest in the war remains limited even among academic historians. In many respects World War I became the "forgotten war" because Americans never developed a unifying collective memory about its meaning or the political lessons it offered. Americans remembered the Civil War as the war that ended slavery and saved the union, World War II as "the good war" that eliminated fascist threats in Europe and the Pacific, the Cold War as a struggle for survival against a communist foe, and Vietnam as an unpopular war. By comparison, the First World War failed to find a stable place in the national narrative.

The First World War in American popular culture, 1918-2014

Throughout the twentieth century, literature offered the American imagination its most sustained encounter with the war. Lost Generation novelists Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms, 1929), John Dos Passos (Three Soldiers, 1921; 1919, 1932), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise, 1920) wrote enduring classics that embraced themes of disillusionment, cynicism, absurdity, and sexual dysfunction. (1) These novels portrayed the war as a rite of passage for young men and women who lost their adolescent naivete within the crucible of war. Classic American films also reinforced the prevailing portrait of senseless slaughter along the Western Front. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957) condensed the war into the horror of trench warfare, corrupt officers, and disillusioned youth. (2) This emphasis on human carnage permeated the larger culture, setting a paradigm for understanding the war even among those who never actually read these books or watched these films. Novels and films that valorized the war's idealism and sacrifice, such as Willa Cather's One of Ours (1922), Edith Wharton's A Son at the Front (1923), and Sergeant York (1928) had no lasting impact on popular memory. (3)

Over time Lost Generation novels and films served less as indictments of the First World War and more as universal statements on the shock of confronting the reality of war. The themes of disillusionment highlighted in these artistic works struck a nerve during the Vietnam War era when Americans began once again to question the efficacy of using war to spread democratic values. Stanley Cooperman's World War I and the American Novel (1967) drew parallels between the sentiments expressed in anti-war fiction of the 1920s and streets protests against the Vietnam War. (4) Recently, however, Keith Gandal has reevaluated the origins of Lost Generation disillusionment. (5) Gandal argues that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were actually part of the "generation that lost out" on the chance to lead men into battle. The root of the disillusionment that crept into their postwar fiction came not from having experienced fighting first-hand, but rather from having failed to reach the Western Front as officers, he contends.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, official committees mobilized to commemorate a war that they expected Americans to long regard as a seminal event in the nation's history. The American Battle Monuments Commission undertook the massive task of compiling a comprehensive battlefield guidebook. (6) The Commission expected tourists and pilgrims to retrace the steps of American soldiers, visit the battlefield markers erected by various units, and pay their respects at the eight official overseas war cemeteries. Published in 1938, the guide, however, soon fell into obscurity, collecting dust on library shelves. (7) Veterans' organizations and local communities also mobilized to erect monuments throughout the nation. But by the time the fundraising and construction had concluded in the late 1920s and early 1930s public interest in the war had waned.

Similarly, few Americans bought or read the slew of participant memoirs that appeared in the interwar period. Some were poorly written, while others appeared after the reading public had tired of rehashing the war. Many memoir writers also found that their accounts differed too dramatically from the now-accepted paradigm established by the Lost Generation novelists. Steven Trout notes, for instance, that the combat memoir of John Lewis Barkley, a highly decorated U.S. soldier, "did not line up with accepted wisdom (at least among artists and intellectuals) about how soldiers of the Great War were supposed to remember their experiences." (8) Barkley championed camaraderie and individual resilience. Something of a "war lover," he relished the excitement of battle and killing enemy soldiers. Out of step with the times, Barkley's memoir failed to find an audience.

Unlike the Somme for the British or Verdun for the French, the 1918 Meuse-Argonne campaign (the culminating US battle in World War I) found no lasting place in American memory. The high death toll did not result in an indictment of American military leadership (as it did in Vietnam), nor did the victory cause subsequent generations of Americans to relish their role in defeating Germany (as in World War II). Other wars, historian Ed Lengel contends, simply offer Americans better stories--ones with a clear beginning and end, with easily identifiable heroes and villains who serve as mirrors that allow Americans to see their values, their strengths, and their flaws more clearly. (9) The memory of World War I, by contrast, focuses nearly exclusively on the universal horrors of war, and therefore offers no such prism for championing American exceptionalism.

Steven Trout offers a different argument for the indifference and ignorance that pervades American society about the First World War. (10) Rather than wilfully purging the war from the national consciousness, Trout believes that Americans remembered the war in too many diverse ways. What exactly should the nation recall about the war? The failure of neutrality? The bravery of the combat soldier? The futility of trench warfare? The racial discrimination that permeated the ranks? The domestic attacks on German-Americans? The botched peace process? These competing memories reflected existing political and social divisions within American society during the twenties and thirties, preventing Americans from forming a sustainable, collective memory about the war.

Nonetheless, from 1918 through 1945, the war was anything but forgotten, suggesting that "forgetting" is a more recent phenomenon. Historians have traced the physical presence of World War I in towns and cities where Americans drove their cars on Pershing Drives, attended meetings in Memorial Halls, and watched football games on Soldiers' Fields. (11) Critical of the plethora of mass-produced statues erected after the Civil War that lionized leaders and foot soldiers, memorialization in the 1920s took a utilitarian turn, honoring servicemen through the creation of community restructures that improved civic life. For many years the war occupied a singular place in the nation's capital commemorative landscape after the remains of an unidentified soldier were buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1921. At a time when no wars had national monuments (the present structures dedicated to World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam War appeared towards the end of the twentieth century), the creation of a site of mourning and remembrance explicitly for World War I represented a unique commemorative practice.

Almost immediately, however, Americans splintered in the meaning they attached to the Unknown Soldier. Americans debated whether the Tomb represented victory, peace, or valor (the sculpture on the sarcophagus included allegorical figures for all three). African-American Civil Rights activists adopted the trope of the Unknown Soldier to highlight the nation's refusal to adequately recognize the contributions of black soldiers. Town monuments also reflected this ambiguity over whether the nation was commemorating victory or mourning loss in the statues they erected with plaques listing the community's war dead.

Over time, townsfolk added the names of fallen soldiers from other wars to these plaques, weakening their symbolic link to World War I. A similar dilution occurred when the remains of unidentified soldiers from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam were buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. (12) The same fate befell the annual Armistice Day commemorations that began on 11 November 1919 to remember the fallen in the First World War. In 1954, Armistice Day became Veterans Day, a holiday dedicated to honoring all living and deceased members of the armed forces. Such transformations were not unique to American remembrance of World War I. The passage of time had weakened ties between the Civil War and Decoration Days, which had been originally two separate days for relatives in the north and south to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. By the twentieth century, as the divisions between north and south healed, the term Memorial Day came into vogue with commemorations now honoring the fallen of all wars on the same day in May. Memorial Day became an official federal holiday in 1971.

In the interwar period the US government erected eight national overseas military cemeteries in France and Belgium, placing the gravesites of individual soldiers in the shadows of massive memorials recalling the scope and complexity of American combat operations. The government constructed overseas memorials and cemeteries to underscore the emergence of the United States as a major world power during the war, but burying fallen American soldiers overseas proved domestically contentious. In 1917, Secretary of War Newton Baker (1871-1937) had promised to return the bodies of war dead to their families for burial in local communities. In 1919, however, the government reversed course and began pressuring families to keep their loved ones near the field of honor where they had fallen. The specter of thousands of coffins arriving home presented the worrisome prospect that grief might become the predominant memory of the war. Equally disturbing was the possibility that bringing home all war dead would allow France and Britain to downplay the American contribution to the overall victory. In the end, nearly 70% of families demanded that the government repatriate the bodies of their loved ones. With fewer bodies available to offer visual evidence of America's contribution to the victory, US officials designed the official overseas cemeteries with ample space between gravestones to camouflage the fact that so few American soldiers were buried in them. Today few Americans visit these cemeteries, whose guest books are filled with the names of nearby villagers or European tourists. (13)

Despite the redesign and rededication of the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, as the National World War I Museum in 2006, and the publicity surrounding the 2011 death of Frank Buckles (1901-2011), the last surviving American World War I veteran, no wide-scale renewed public interest in the war has occurred as the centennial of the American entry into the war approaches. As of this writing, it remains unclear what, if any, public ceremonies will mark the 100th anniversary of the war in the United States (as opposed to the United Kingdom, which pledged 50 million [pounds sterling] to mark the occasion). The memory landscape within the United States still remains dominated by anniversaries related to the Civil War and World War II.

WORLD WAR I IN AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE, 1918-2014

The war exerted its greatest impact on American domestic political culture during the 1930s. Two singular events in American history, the Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages and 1932 Bonus March by World War I veterans, revealed the resonance of the war's legacy during the Great Depression. …

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